- Alex McKenzie
- Personal
-
Autobiographical Anecdotes
>
- Breakfast - 1940s & 50s
- Those Were the Days - 1950s
- Building Underwater Gear, 1950's
- Can't Let Go - 1953
- The Turning Point, 1957
- Mexico, October 1965
- Bilbo Baggins 1971
- A brush with death? 1977
- What I didn't do, 1979
- Brazil 1996
- Family Dinner Time
- Forbidden Fruit
- Solo Sailing Incident, ca 2000
- Joel Nichols - 2013
- Manatees, January 2014
- Motorcycle Incident, June 2014
- Time is a Thief, 2015
- Never Too Old to Learn, 2015
- Two Weeks in Rockport MA 2015
- A Fork in the Road - 2016
- The Winos
- Smooth Stones
- Change
- No One Would Have Guessed ... - 2017
- What I Discovered ...
- At This Time of Year ... 2017
-
AMC Trail Crew
>
-
The Trail Crew in Appalachia
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- With the Trail Gang
- Recovery of the Old Bridle Path on Mt. Lafayette
- The Trail Spree of 1929
- Webster Cliff Trail 1912-1914
- Trail Bridges
- The Story of the Mahoosuc
- 1939 trail report
- June 1940 trail report
- Dec 1940 trail report
- 1941 trail plan
- A Vacation With Pay
- 25 Years of the AMC Trail Crew
- Five Thousand Trail Signs
- The AMC Trail System
- The Pace of the Grub-Hoe
- 1953 trails report
- 1954 trails report
- trail report - call for volunteers
- Trail Erosion
- Ethan Pond Shelter
- An Early AMC Trail Crew
- Great Gulf Shelter
- The AMC Trail Crew 1919-1964
- The Evolution of a Trailman
- Trail Crew Thoughts
- Trail Design. Construction & Maintenance
- Of Mules, Mice, and Madison
- The Green Plate Special
- 1980-81 trails report
- Trail Blazers
- White Mountain Trail Crew - 75 Years
- 1960 Trail Crew Resignation
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The Trail Crew in Appalachia
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- 2017 Summer Trip
-
Autobiographical Anecdotes
>
- Professional
- INWG Documents
- Family
-
Alexander A. McKenzie II
>
- Mount Washington >
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LORAN
>
- Crusing the Labrador
- Acquisition of Canadian sites for Long-Range-Navigation Stations
- Sites #1 and #2: Loran Memo #108
- LRN Site No. 3
- Report of Construction at L.R.N. Site #3, 8/10-11/5 1942
- LRN Site No. 4 (Bonavista Point, Newfoundland)
- Supplies for Site 4
- Drawings Left at Site #4 by A.A. McKenzie
- Site 4 Letter of March 24, 1943
- LRN Site No. 5
- LRN Site No. 8
- LRN Site No. 9
- Test Plan - Eastern US
- LORAN - Part 1
- LORAN - Part 2
- LORAN - Part 3
- End of LORAN
- Genealogy >
-
Alexander A. McKenzie II
>
- Photos
-
Europe 2015 -first half
>
- Barcelona April 2015
- Pont du Gard France - April 24, 2015
- Nimes France - April 27, 2015
- Aix-en Provence - April 28, 2015
- Cote d'Azur - April 29, 2015
- Vence to Gourdon - April 30, 2015
- Eze France - May 1, 2015
- Milano - May 3, 2015
- Parco Burchina - May 6, 2015
- Ivrea & Aosta Valley - May 7, 2015
- Torino - May 9, 2015
- Europe 2015 - second half >
- Indianapolis Art Museum - July 2015
- Ringling Estate
- Oak Park 2017
- Frank Lloyd Wright in Florida
-
Europe 2015 -first half
>
- Edit Website
Can't Let Go
When I was 9 my family started spending summers in New Hampshire. My father built a small shack (12' x 14' with one room and a loft) on a 40-acre piece of land he got from a friend, accessible by a dirt road. My 2 brothers and I slept in the loft. Downstairs was a bed for my parents, a wood stove for cooking, a table with 2 chairs for adults and a bench for kids, and some storage cabinets. We got water from a well a few hundred yards down the road. We kept things cold in a mossy pool near the house. We used an outhouse. My father drove the family up just before the Fourth of July and got things set for the summer. He went back to New Jersey by train after a week or two, and spent the summer working in New York City. He came back by train near Labor Day, closed things up for the winter, and drove us all home again. We lived in the woods; our nearest neighbors were a mile and a half away. We loved it!
Every summer I adopted some project to try to finish before we went home. One year it was building a diving helmet. One year it was surveying the property. The summer I was 12 it was building a log cabin without using any nails. I got logs from a woodlot across the road which had been lumbered the year before. What was left was logs smaller than 4 inches in diameter. Bigger logs would have been better, but these were all I could manage to drag to the cabin site anyway. The cabin was probably about 9' by 5' inside. There was a door near one end of a long wall, and a window in the center of the opposite wall. I notched the ends of the logs at the corners to hold them together. To support the logs ending at the door and window openings I drove vertical logs into the ground on both sides of the wall and tied the vertical logs together at the top, leaving them just 4 inches apart from top to bottom. These vertical logs formed a slot to hold the ends of the wall logs.
Of course, there were a lot of other things to occupy my time during the summer: hiking, swimming, reading, and playing games. So by the time summer was over I had erected the walls, but I hadn't built a window or a door to close the openings I'd left, or built a roof. Next year!
When I was 9 my family started spending summers in New Hampshire. My father built a small shack (12' x 14' with one room and a loft) on a 40-acre piece of land he got from a friend, accessible by a dirt road. My 2 brothers and I slept in the loft. Downstairs was a bed for my parents, a wood stove for cooking, a table with 2 chairs for adults and a bench for kids, and some storage cabinets. We got water from a well a few hundred yards down the road. We kept things cold in a mossy pool near the house. We used an outhouse. My father drove the family up just before the Fourth of July and got things set for the summer. He went back to New Jersey by train after a week or two, and spent the summer working in New York City. He came back by train near Labor Day, closed things up for the winter, and drove us all home again. We lived in the woods; our nearest neighbors were a mile and a half away. We loved it!
Every summer I adopted some project to try to finish before we went home. One year it was building a diving helmet. One year it was surveying the property. The summer I was 12 it was building a log cabin without using any nails. I got logs from a woodlot across the road which had been lumbered the year before. What was left was logs smaller than 4 inches in diameter. Bigger logs would have been better, but these were all I could manage to drag to the cabin site anyway. The cabin was probably about 9' by 5' inside. There was a door near one end of a long wall, and a window in the center of the opposite wall. I notched the ends of the logs at the corners to hold them together. To support the logs ending at the door and window openings I drove vertical logs into the ground on both sides of the wall and tied the vertical logs together at the top, leaving them just 4 inches apart from top to bottom. These vertical logs formed a slot to hold the ends of the wall logs.
Of course, there were a lot of other things to occupy my time during the summer: hiking, swimming, reading, and playing games. So by the time summer was over I had erected the walls, but I hadn't built a window or a door to close the openings I'd left, or built a roof. Next year!
During the fall I began to think about what I would need to live in my log cabin next summer. Probably because I was a growing teenager a lot of my thoughts were about food. I planned to build a stone fireplace outside for cooking, and buy a few pots and a frying pan from one of the “rummage sales” held by my church. I could whittle a spoon and fork out of sticks, and I had a pocket knife, but how about something to hold my meal? I didn't want ceramic pieces, which I would certainly break, so I decided to create a combination plate and bowl out of wood as a junior high school shop project. My idea was to turn a plate out of hardwood that would not absorb liquid from the food I was eating, and to deepen the center portion to form a shallow bowl for cereal or stew. I needed to come up with a project using the school lathe, and this was ideal! To my chagrin the result looked very much like a church collection plate. I should have foreseen this, but I didn't.
As things turned out, the summer I started the log cabin was the last summer I spent on the family property in New Hampshire. The log cabin was never finished, and I never spent even one night in it. My brother owns the property now, but with the passage of time the cabin has rotted away, and there is no trace of it left.
What is left from that phase of my life is my wooden combination plate and bowl. For many years it sat on top of my dresser and was the place I would toss my keys and loose change. Now that space is occupied by hearing aids and pill bottles – clear signs of an older person. The bowl sits in a storage box in the back of my closet, along with some other reminders of days gone by. It would make sense to get rid of it, but it is the only tangible item left from those summers when I could give my attention to surveying, and underwater exploration, and building a log cabin. I just can't quite bring myself to do the sensible thing and throw it away.
Addendum: After hearing this story the writers' group members urged me to get the plate/bowl out of storage. It is now a wall ornament over my desk.
Written as an assignment for the writers' group at The Fountains in October 2016. The assignment was to write about something I could not discard.
As things turned out, the summer I started the log cabin was the last summer I spent on the family property in New Hampshire. The log cabin was never finished, and I never spent even one night in it. My brother owns the property now, but with the passage of time the cabin has rotted away, and there is no trace of it left.
What is left from that phase of my life is my wooden combination plate and bowl. For many years it sat on top of my dresser and was the place I would toss my keys and loose change. Now that space is occupied by hearing aids and pill bottles – clear signs of an older person. The bowl sits in a storage box in the back of my closet, along with some other reminders of days gone by. It would make sense to get rid of it, but it is the only tangible item left from those summers when I could give my attention to surveying, and underwater exploration, and building a log cabin. I just can't quite bring myself to do the sensible thing and throw it away.
Addendum: After hearing this story the writers' group members urged me to get the plate/bowl out of storage. It is now a wall ornament over my desk.
Written as an assignment for the writers' group at The Fountains in October 2016. The assignment was to write about something I could not discard.